Apache Alternatives for Serving PHP

Do you have problems serving more than two pages per second on your WordPress or Drupal blog? Do the sites of your competitors serve pages faster than yours? Their secret weapon may be a different web server and PHP combo than Apache and mod_php. But don’t worry – you can turn to one of these alternative solutions too, and improve your web server throughput without upgrading your hardware resources.

First, some background. In general an HTTP or web server sends browser clients a requested page, usually in HTML code, or a page dynamically created with a language such as PHP, one of the most common programming languages for web pages. The PHP scripting language resembles JavaScript, Java, and Perl, all of which share a common ancestor, the C programming language. If you need to embed dynamic text, such as the result of queries on databases, into static text, you’ll find PHP extremely useful.